4/4 Are Killing my Country by RobertMacFarlane

Last year, I was approached by OneLife, the "lifestyle" magazine of Land Rover, which is sent out to Land Rover owners in more than 60 countries and is, according to its own modest marketing, "worthy of the world's best coffee tables".

OneLife had a writing commission in mind for me. I would be flown out to the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean for a three-day stay. There, I would conduct a "beach-based" interview with "the world-famous freediver Tanya Streeter": the conceit being that I, as a mountaineer, and Streeter as a diver, were both explorers of the vertical. I would stay in the best hotel on the islands. Naturally, all expenses would be covered and all transport pre-arranged. The fee for the subsequent 2,000-word article would run to a generous five-figure sum.

If only it had not been Land Rover making the offer.

How ardently I wished for it not to have been Land Rover.

Transport is the fastest-growing source of carbon dioxide production in Britain: transport emissions increased by 50% between 1990 and 2002.

In the main, this is due to the unsustainable growth in air travel.

It is also, however, down to the massively burgeoning 4x4 market. Sales of 4x4s grew by 12.8% in this country last year, to 179,000 vehicles: more than double the number sold 10 years ago. Only 12% of 4x4s are ever driven "off-road", 40% never leave the city.

One cost of the 4x4 boom is long-term environmental.

Big 4x4s in urban conditions manage 13 miles to the gallon; the very biggest manage four. Four miles to the gallon. To drive a 4x4, given the disastrous rapidity of climate change, is to demonstrate the same reverse-denial of the lung-cancer victim who continues to smoke cigarettes after diagnosis.

My OneLife contact sent me two issues of the magazine.

It was lavishly produced, and "landscape" was its glamour, its sales pitch. On every page, Land Rovers romped across winter hillsides, over desert dunes, along boulder-cobbled river-beds.

There were glossy centrefold spreads of eco-porn: thrusting mountains, brothel-pink sunsets. cracked mud patterns served as wallpaper between text boxes. Nature was being used to sell a product which embodies the principles by which nature must not be understood.

OneLife - what a happy holistic world the name evokes! - is of course only conforming to large-scale 4x4 advertising strategies. You will be familiar with them from television commercials: gleaming semi-militarised vehicles ploughing through a swamp, or along a cliff-top, before slewing to a rakish halt at a view-point. The vehicles' names - the "Touareg", the "Bedouin" - are repellently shameless steals from aboriginal cultures, designed to raise atavistic hairs on the backs of consumers' necks.

4x4 advertising is dedicated to manipulating landscapes into generic forms. All that it requires of a landscape is that it evoke the idea of challenge - something resistant to be conquered, something natural to be tamed. A river is valued for its difficulty of fording. A mountain for its dramatic and nameless escarpments. No landscape can be only itself: it must represent an obstacle of some sort.

The hypocrisies of 4x4 marketing are dark, multiple and pernicious. Everything about the product urges us to the wrong relationship with our environment. They expound a vision of an unspoiled and untroubled land, even as they market the tools of its further wreckage.

The massive sales growth of the 4x4 is one dismaying example among many of the gap which currently exists between knowledge and place.

Each month, it seems, that gap widens. Apocryphal stories circulate: about the schoolchildren who do not know that milk comes from cows, or who cannot identify a cucumber from a line-up of vegetables. In April of this year, the Woodland Trust published research showing that 94% of British children are unable to identify common native trees - beech, ash, birch, hazel - from their leaves, and that more than 40% of seven to 10-year-olds have never visited a wood.

Fossil skeletons may belong to an unknown human ancestor

The fossil remains found in a cave in South Africa could represent an evolutionary link between tree-dwelling apes and our earliest human ancestors to walk upright

Fossil skull of Australopithecus sediba, a possible human ancestor found in cave deposits at Malapa, South Africa. Reconstruction courtesy of Paul Tafforeau, Lee Berger, the ESRF, Grenoble and the University of the Witwatersrand Link to this video

Fossilised skeletons recovered from a deep underground cave in South Africa belong to a previously unknown species of human ancestor, scientists claim.

The partial skeletons of an adult female and a young male, aged 11 or 12, were found lying side by side in sediments that first covered their remains an estimated 1.9m years ago.

The individuals are thought to have fallen into the cave network through a fissure before being carried a few metres by mud or water into a subterranean pool, where they were gradually encased in rock.

The extraordinary remains are thought to represent a period of evolutionary transition between tree-dwelling apes and the earliest human ancestors, or hominids, to take their first tentative steps on two feet. Their position at the very root of our family tree has led scientists to claim that the skeletons will help define what it means to be human.

The remains were recovered alongside the fossilised bones of at least 25 other animals, including sabre-toothed cats, a hyena, a wild dog, several antelope and a horse, according to two reports in the journal Science. At the time the creatures died, the region was dominated by a grassy plain crossed by wooded valleys.

The discovery of the mass grave has led researchers to suggest that the ancient animals and the hominids fell into the cave network through "death trap" holes in the surface and were unable to escape. The skeletons were so well preserved that palaeontologists believe the two individuals fell into the cave together and were dead and buried within days or weeks.

The remains, found in the Malapa cave network at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site 40km outside Johannesburg, have already triggered a row over their identity, because they share anatomical features with both early humans from the genus, Homo, and their ancient predecessors, the Australopithecines, or southern apes.

The skeletons have long arms similar to those of orang-utans, a trait shared with Australopithecines, which suggests they were adept at living in trees. But unlike other Australopithecines, they have long legs and a pelvis that is well adapted to walking upright. Analysis of the male's skull revealed small teeth and facial characteristics seen in early members of the genus Homo. Their brains were exceptionally small, around a third the size of a modern human's.

Ian Sample, science correspondent guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 April 2010

Down and Out in Paris and London,

By George Orwell, 1933

There were eccentric characters in the hotel. The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people—people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.

There were the Rougiers, for instance, an old, ragged, dwarfish couple who plied an extraordinary trade. They used to sell postcards on the Boulevard St Michel. The curious thing was that the postcards were sold in sealed packets as pornographic ones, but were actually photographs of chateaux on the Loire; the buyers did not discover this till too late, and of course never complained. The Rougiers earned about a hundred francs a week, and by strict economy managed to be always half starved and half drunk. The filth of their room was such that one could smell it on the floor below. According to Madame F., neither of the Rougiers had taken off their clothes for four years.

http://www.planetebook.com/Down-and-Out-in-Paris-and-London.asp

Gentle Gorillas, Turbulent Times

By George B. Schaller

(Originally published in the October 1995 issue of National Geographic)

On January 22, 1991, my wife, Kay, and I sat on the summit of Mount Visoke, one of the eight Virunga volcanoes that straddle the borders of Rwanda, Zaire, and Uganda. We had come to help with a mountain gorilla film. That morning we had left the Karisoke Research Center, the base of Dian Fossey's gorilla work from 1967 until she was killed by unknown assailants in 1985. Her hut of green corrugated metal remained, littered with remnants of her past. Still on the wall was a plastic Santa Claus, a poignant reminder that she died at Christmastime. Beside her cabin, shaded by moss-laden boughs of hagenia trees, was her grave, along with those of 17 gorillas, one dog, and one monkey.

But it was not a day for us to dwell on tragedy. Instead of the swirling gray fog and rain-drenched slopes that are so common here, the volcanoes rose stark and clear above a shimmering forest. To the west, in the saddle between Mikeno and Karisimbi, the two highest volcanoes, was a place called Kabara. Kay and I had lived there in 1959 and 1960 while conducting the first intensive gorilla study. Now, after three decades, we had returned to an idyll of our past.

The gorillas on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes—some 300 animals—inhabit a small forested island surrounded by a sea of people. Twenty miles to the north is Uganda's Impenetrable Forest, now protected as Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, another island with perhaps 300 gorillas. These 285 square miles represent the entire world of the remaining mountain gorillas. Years ago, when I watched the gorillas' leisurely life, the animals eating and sleeping and tumbling in play, I was glad that they could not fathom their rarity and my concerns. We have a common past, but only humans have been given the mental power to worry about their fate.

Now the radiance of those months returned as intense memories. Once again Kay and I followed a swath of head-high vegetation until soft grumbles signaled contented gorillas ahead. We recalled old gorilla acquaintances: Big Daddy, the silverback leader of a large group, his power majestic even in repose, and Junior, a reckless young male that liked to linger near us. Once a female with an infant on her back had climbed with startling innocence upon a low branch to sit with me, probably the first time that a wild gorilla and a human were amicably side-by-side.

However, to me that gorilla study had meaning beyond the gathering of new facts. Gorillas had long been viewed as symbols of savagery, "exceedingly ferocious" in temper, as a 19th-century missionary phrased it. My task was not to capture or master them but solely to interpret their life. So I approached them with empathy and respect, wanting nothing from them but peace and proximity. And they accepted my presence with an astounding generosity of spirit. The recent decades have been a turning point, indeed a revolution, in our relationship with animals. Humans have begun to overcome cross-species barriers, achieving intimacy with humpback whales, chimpanzees, lions, mountain sheep, wolves. The gorillas of popular image were a fantasy. It pleases me that I helped change perceptions.

The gorilla, of course, is more than an animal. These apes are a primal part of human heritage. Our kin. We traveled down different evolutionary paths, the gorillas creating their own world, complete and coherent, and humans shaping theirs. No one who looks into a gorilla's eyes—intelligent, gentle, vulnerable—can remain unchanged, for the gap between ape and human vanishes; we know that the gorilla still lives within us. Do gorillas also recognize this ancient connection?

Our reveries that day on Mount Visoke were shattered by a walkie-talkie message from the lowlands: The Rwandan Patriotic Front—led by ethnic Tutsi—had invaded from Uganda. We were ordered to leave the mountains immediately. Led by primatologist Diane Doran, the director of Karisoke at the time, we descended to the town of Ruhengeri. Caught in the middle of a battle between rebels and the Rwandan Army the following day, we were evacuated by French paratroopers.

Ironically, Kay and I also had to terminate our project in 1960 because of war. The Belgian Congo, now Zaire, gained independence that year, and with it came years of unrest. And in Rwanda, a Belgian protectorate until 1962, the Hutu tribe waged a civil war against the ruling Tutsi. Many Tutsi fled the country, living in exile until they invaded their former homeland in 1990. The renewed war climaxed in the carnage of April 1994; soon after, the Rwandan Patriotic Front achieved victory and formed a new government.

The mountain gorillas have a long past but only a century of history, much of it turbulent. This history began in 1902 when a German officer, Capt. Oscar von Beringe, first encountered the apes—and shot two. In the next quarter century, collectors and hunters captured or killed more than 50 gorillas in the Virunga region. Carl Akeley of the American Museum of Natural History shot five gorillas in 1921, but he was so impressed with the apes that he prompted the Belgian government to establish Africa's first national park, Albert National Park, for them in 1925.

Belgian protection gave the gorillas relative peace until the turmoil in 1960, when the Belgian park staff fled. Civil war, insurrection, and the division of Albert Park into Zairean and Rwandan sectors demoralized the guard force. Cattle invaded the fragile uplands, and poachers roamed the forests. Their wire snares cut deep into the gorillas' flesh, but some managed to tear free. In one group of 11 gorillas two animals had only one hand each; another's hand was deformed. Gorilla hands and heads were sold as souvenirs to tourists. And the gorillas lost much forest. In 1958 the Belgians in Rwanda turned over 27 square miles of gorilla habitat to farmers, and in 1968 another 38 square miles, or 40 percent of the remaining forest, was given to a European-sponsored agricultural scheme. It was a desolate time, to which the gorillas could be only mute and passive witnesses.

Gorilla numbers plummeted. In 1960 I estimated about 450 in the Virunga region. Censuses during the 1970s showed around 275, and by 1981 there were only 250. During this critical time Dian Fossey, assisted for varying periods by Craig Sholley, David Watts, Kelly Stewart, Ian Redmond, Alexander Harcourt, and others, was at Karisoke. Dian harassed poachers with obsessive zeal. And she made the world aware of the gorilla's plight. Her heroic vigil helped the apes endure. However, her unyielding confrontational approach with local people, one that she termed "expedient action," ultimately cannot save wildlife. Conservation depends on the goodwill of the local population.

A new era in gorilla conservation began in 1978 when Amy Vedder and Bill Weber of the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York arrived to establish gorilla tourism and an education program for the Rwandans. The following year their work was incorporated into the Mountain Gorilla Project, financed by an international consortium of conservation organizations. This integrated program of antipoaching, tourism, and education, all in cooperation with a receptive Rwandan government, had a marked impact on local attitudes.

A well-trained guard force maintained the national park. The education program created widespread awareness not just of the gorillas but also of the need to protect forests. The Virungas in Rwanda represent less than half of one percent of the country's land area but 10 percent of its water catchment. Without the forests to store water, streams would disappear during the dry season and deprive the dense human population of water. Four gorilla groups were soon habituated to tourists' viewing them at close range. Fees for tourists were high, yet so enthralled were visitors that gorilla viewing became at one time Rwanda's third largest earner of foreign exchange. Similar programs were later initiated on the Zaire and Uganda sides of the volcanoes.

The Mountain Gorilla Project also had an unforeseen impact. The people of Rwanda became proud of their apes. The gorillas became part of Rwanda's identity in the world, a part of the nation's vision of itself.

The 1980s were a golden time for the 30 or so gorilla groups on the Virunga volcanoes, and the population grew again, to about 320. The innovative program initiated by Amy Vedder and Bill Weber had become a classic story of conservation success, one that has been emulated in its approach many times.

Then the most recent civil war violated the gorillas' peaceful existence once again. Yet in spite of the turmoil, with soldiers of both factions traversing the forests, the gorillas have not been decimated. Indeed the Rwandan Patriotic Front expressed public concern for the gorillas' safety even while it was fighting. The new prime minister, Faustin Twagiramungu, has affirmed his country's commitment to the apes. Given the urgent and crushing social needs of Rwanda, this declaration is remarkable. For one species to fight for the survival of another, even in times of stress, is something new in evolution. In this, more than all our technology, lies our claim to being human.

A Short Story by Jeanette Winterson

I am your inner polar bear. Find me before it's too late.

There's a photograph of me rafting an iceberg, the melted sea all around, the sea that should have been solid.

I was thinking about the end of Frankenstein - do you remember? The monster has fled to the icy wastes because he can find no home; the thing that he is has no place, and when something has no place, first it does a lot of damage and then it dies. The monster curses Frankenstein for creating him without a world where he can live - then as the waters break around the ice-bound ship, the monster leaps from Frankenstein's cabin and is borne away on an ice-raft into the unending night.

I am thinking about the end of the world - not because I am religious, but because I am a polar bear, and the world will end for me faster than it will for you, and you'll put some of me in zoos and special chill nature reserves, but what you will really be excited about is oil and trade and who controls the North West Passage.

And I will be a monster because only monsters have no home.

When you take my world away from me I'm going to come and live with you. All your civilised and all your science will be on the outside, along with all your trade and aid. Inside, there will be me. Your inner polar bear - the wild free place white pristine - sun dropped red behind my head head back jaw open swallowing pounds and pounds of fresh killed life raw clean cold. The dive of me the weight of me.

I will be everything you have lost. I will be everything you neglected. I will be everything you forgot. I will be the wild place sold for money.

You see, when I lived far away, you knew I was there, and I kept something for you, even though you had never seen a polar bear or an ice floe. Even though you are not adapted to my conditions. I kept your wild, cold, raw. And the lion keeps something for you, and the mangrove swamp and the coral and the spider and the wren.

You think I am a stupid polar bear? Go up into space and look back at this diamond cut planet, polar capped, white whirled. It is one planet, one place, and there is nothing else like it anywhere in the solar system. When you see it whole, you remember that it's not polar bears over there, and snakes over here; it's one place, one strange special place. It comes as a whole or not at all.

You will live longer than us - my kind, not just my polar bear kind but all of us who need a home and you so envious that you want all the homes, leaving nothing you can't sell or rent. Enclosure of the whole world.

Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs disappeared and something like a man began. There must have been some dinosaur dust left behind - how else to explain the Homo sapiens you have become, greedy for everything, nothing in the whole world safe if you are here. All I can comfort myself with, as the ice melts under me, is that you are as stupid as they were. What's the difference between a dinosaur and a human being? A dinosaur destroys everything - but doesn't call it progress.

Climb on my back and I'll carry you to the top of the snow-silent mountains and let you look out over the rim of the earth. Look, beyond us are the stars, and if I reach with my paws I can use the stars as footholds. Higher now, through the witnesses, which I think the stars are, the roof of our life bright with silver eyes. What do they see? This blue planet, and near her, the white moon that holds us in her gravitational pull so that we spin at the speed of life. Not too fast, not too slow, the speed of life.

As I climb through the stars, stretching myself into a constellation, the Great Polar Bear, I wonder how many millions of years it will be before a wiser species than Homo sapiens inhabits the earth? And I wonder if I will ever come home?

When the earth re-evolves herself, after the plagues, the bombs, the wipe-outs, the lights-out, will there be polar bears? And lions? And wrens?

When earth begins again I would like to slide down a chute of stars into an icy untamed sea and swim through the cold to the ice floe where there will be others like me, not monsters, homed. A place to be.

But until then I would rather climb away, not wait for the last piece of ice to melt, but climb into the airless cold of outer space where I too can be a witness to what happens next.

Once upon a time there was a polar bear. He had nowhere to live so he came to live in your head. You started to think polar bear thoughts about icyness and wilderness. You went shopping and looked at fish. At night you dreamed your skin was fur. When you got in the bath you dropped through nameless waters deeper than regret. You left the cold tap running. You flooded the house. You dived into winter with no clothes on. You sought loneliness. You wanted to see the sun rise after a night that lasted as long as all the things you have done wrong. You wanted to see the sun come up and no one to be near you. You wanted to look out over the rim of the world. But you live in the city and the rest is gone.

And all the longings and all the loss can't bring back the dead. The most beautiful place on earth was everywhere - a raft in the wilderness of space, precarious, unlikely, our polar bear home.

Robinson Crusoe

I WAS born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, though not of that country, my father being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull. He got a good estate by merchandise, and leaving off his trade, lived afterwards at York, from whence he had married my mother, whose relations were named Robinson, a very good family in that country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but, by the usual corruption of words in England, we are now called - nay we call ourselves and write our name - Crusoe; and so my companions always called me.

I had two elder brothers, one of whom was lieutenant-colonel to an English regiment of foot in Flanders, formerly commanded by the famous Colonel Lockhart, and was killed at the battle near Dunkirk against the Spaniards. What became of my second brother I never knew, any more than my father or mother knew what became of me.

Being the third son of the family and not bred to any trade, my head began to be filled very early with rambling thoughts. My father, who was very ancient, had given me a competent share of learning, as far as house-education and a country free school generally go, and designed me for the law; but I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea; and my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay, the commands of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be something fatal in that propensity of nature, tending directly to the life of misery which was to befall me.

Read the complete story here:

http://www.enotes.com/robinson-crusoe-text

Ghost Species

The spectres of the Norfolk Fens
On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost. First, I caught a train twenty miles north from Cambridge to Littleport, a market town on the Cambridge–Norfolk border. At Littleport I was met by a friend called Justin Partyka, and Justin drove me in his little white baker’s van up into the Fens proper.
Robert Macfarlane

Listen to the author reading in this video:
http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Video-Ghost-Species

Read the complete article here:
http://www.granta.com/Magazine/102/Ghost-Species/Page-1